Maui Tropical Plantation owner has big plans for Waikapu | News, Sports, Jobs

WAIKAPU-Mike Atherton, owner of Maui Tropical Plantation, has big plans for the small town of Waikapu and is looking to build thousands of homes and businesses in the area over the next decade.

“This is an opportunity of a lifetime; to build a new town in Maui,” he said.

Once a bustling epicenter for sugar cane production and commerce on Maui, Waikapu has become primarily a residential area that has lost its identity as a place of business and growth.

Atherton, 66, is looking to change that with the Waikapu Country Town project. It calls for the construction of retail stores, restaurants, an elementary school and nearly 1,500 residences, according to an environmental impact statement preparation notice for the project.

The 1,600-acre project would be built in two, five-year phases on both sides of Honoapiilani Highway. The tropical plantation would serve as the “village center” and remain relatively untouched, Atherton said. A mix of single-family, multi-family, rural and country town mixed-use homes would be built around the village center, along with a 6-mile bike trail, parks and plenty of parking.

“It’s a combination of Front Street and Paia with a little bit of Honolua Store and some Shops of Wailea thrown in there,” he said. “What that does is it creates jobs. We want to live, we want to work, and we want to play all in the same town.”

Atherton also plans to develop a boulevard, or lane, extending down from the entrance to Maui Tropical Plantation that would have “live-work lofts” straddling it. The lofts would consist of a commercial space downstairs with the owners living upstairs.

“It’s a community of artisans; a village that caters to visitors of Maui,” he said. “It’s the perfect location.”

Atherton stressed the “strong agricultural component” of the project, which includes approximately 800 acres that would be dedicated in perpetuity to open space and agricultural land use. The tropical plantation is home to several organic farmers, and Atherton said he hopes to build a general store to sell fruits and vegetables grown on the property.

“I need that character to create a destination because we’re not going to have big-box grocery retail,” he said. “You have Foodland a mile away. You have two drug stores right across the street from each other, and eventually you’ll have some more.”

The ambitious project to bring back Waikapu has been a decade in the making and began when Atherton met with the late Chris Hart. Hart, who died suddenly in 2012, served as county planning director and was a planning consultant.

Atherton credited Hart for coming up with the idea and encouraging him to pursue the “opportunity of a lifetime.”

“God bless him, he had a vision,” he said.

The project is one of the larger developments in the Maui Island Plan and has gone through several revisions over the years. Plans had originally called for homes to be built high up in Waikapu Valley, like Wailuku Heights, but residents rejected the idea.

Reid Kawabata, president of Waikapu Community Association, recalled meeting Atherton for the first time several years ago and thinking he was “just another developer.”

“He was like the fifth developer, so we were very against him,” Kawabata said. “Our community had heard these developers come in and make all these promises and then as soon as they get their permits ‘voomf.’ But after a year and a half, he brought these plans, and we’d make suggestions and the very next meeting he’d make all these changes.

“We started thinking, ‘This guy might be for real.'”

Maui County Council Member Mike Victorino, who holds the Waikapu-Wailuku-Waihee residency seat, remembered meeting Atherton when he first entered office eight years ago. He said he advised the developer to engage the community or else he would “be in big trouble.”

“The plan you see now was a collaboration with community, businesses and himself to get the real picture and real change for Waikapu that most of the community members are accepting,” Victorino said. “He’s worked very diligently with the community. The way it is today, I can be very supportive of it.”

Atherton said he has gone door to door to meet with residents to ensure their concerns are heard, an effort some developers do not do on the island. Looking down at the map of the project, he pointed at homeowners outside the construction site and talked about meeting each one of them.

“There’s one guy right here on the corner,” he said pointing at the map. “He’s probably most affected by what I do. And I always felt that the neighbors were most important because this is their backyard. So if they’re happy then that’s a step in the right direction.

“They have a right to control their destiny. They’ve been there for quite awhile.”

Waikapu, which also is home to one of the four great waters of Na Wai Eha, has a history of being part of Maui’s sugar cane industry, dating back to the 19th century. Waikapu Plantation was capable of producing 2,000 tons of sugar in the 1870s, and it drilled the first artesian well on the Neighbor Islands, according to the EIS preparation notice.

When the plantation was sold to Wailuku Sugar Co., the two towns along with Waihee were producing around 5,000 tons of sugar annually by 1895.

Victorino recalled the history of the small country town and said many of the plantation homes have since been torn down and that it used to be a “vibrant little camp town.” He said his mother used to talk about the plantation camps, which included the old Hayashi and Kimura locations, but as the plantations downsized “everybody moved to Dream City.”

He said he hopes the project will give new life to the town.

“This is almost like a rebirth of the old Waikapu town,” he said. “I like what I see so far and if we can get the community to buy in, I think it’s a very viable project.”

Atherton will appear before the state Land Use Commission on Wednesday for authorization to prepare an environmental impact statement.

“We came up with this town plan because Waikapu used to be a town,” he said. “But then the plantation ended with Wailuku Sugar (Co.) and the town sort of slowly disappeared. It was getting swallowed up by Wailuku and eventually would’ve been a suburb of Wailuku.

“We wanted to have an identity. We wanted to be Waikapu town. We wanted to stand alone.”

* Chris Sugidono can be reached at csugidono@mauinews.com.

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